Just playing Call of Duty and noticed the death machine spins and I always wondered why.
In: Engineering
As others have mentioned, only gatling guns have to spin to shoot. While heat dissipation and the rate of fire are affected by the rotation, they aren’t really the reason why a gatling gun spins.
Modern gatling guns were developed as faster jet aircraft required a greater volume of fire to hit a target. Gatling guns allow for a greater rate of fire to produce the volume needed. The reason they spin, however, is the rotation allows multiple concurrent cycles of operation within the same weapon.
The standard cycle of operation for a gun is feeding, chambering, locking, firing, unlocking, extracting, ejecting, cocking. In a machine gun, all of these steps must happen in order and the entire cycle must be completed in its entirety for every round that is fired.
The rotation of a gatling gun allows for multiple cycles of operation – one cycle per barrel – to happen concurrently. As the gun (an M61 Vulcan in my head) rotates, a different step of the cycle of operations happens at a specific position. There are six breech bolts in an M61 – one per barrel – that rotate along a cam path machined into the housing of the gun.
Feeding happens at about the 4 o’clock position, when a round is fed into the gun in front of a breech bolt. As the gun rotates, the cam path drives the breech bolt forward, chambering the round and locking at about the 2 o’clock position. Firing happens at about the 12 o’clock position. As rotation continues, the cam path drives the breech bolt back, extracting the brass at about the 10 o’clock position. Then, the brass is ejected at the 8 o clock position.
Because there is a separate barrel and breech bolt at each point, all five of those steps happen simultaneously. On each rotation, each barrel completes a full cycle of operation in its entirety; which also means that on each rotation, the gun completes six individual cycles of operation concurrently.
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